Strategy Games News Bulletin - January 10th, 2020

By Joe Robinson10 Jan 20200

First full week back of 2020, and it’s been a bit of a slow one. Some interesting news bits and bobs to look at for today’s column, but nothing mega worth looking at during the week. Instead we thought we’d cover some things we’ve had in the pipe for a while.

You should read Timothy’s excellent analysis of Imperator: Rome’s 1.3 Patch, as he put in a lot of hours getting down to the nuts and bolts over Christmas. We also decided to go back to some ‘classic’ grand strategy and see what the mod scene for Victoria 2 was like. In a word - confusing.

Meanwhile, in the world of strategy games...

Wargroove gets free DLC next month

Wargroove was one of our favorite strategy games from the first half of 2019, and nearly a year later it's still getting a lot of love and support from the developers. A new free content drop titled ‘Double Trouble’ is due to land on February 6th, which adds a new co-op story campaign, new commanders & units and a lot more.

DOTA Underlords leaving early access in February

DOTA Underlords is Valve’s answer to the Auto Chess phenomenon that swept the early months of 2019. It’s officially been in ‘beta’ since it launched, but now looks set to kick things off for real when the first official season kicks off by the end of February. Our sister site PCGamesN has the full story.

Fantasy Flight Interactive to close

The digital board game market continues to grow, but as with most things there have been casualties. The latest to fall is Fantasy Flight Interactive, the official videogames arm of major board games and miniatures publisher Fantasy Flight Games. To date they’ve only made one game, The Lord of the Rings: Adventure Card Game which was a digital adaptation of a physical card game FFG owned. We’re not sure what’s going to happen to that game, but we do know that studio won’t be making anything else because they’re shutting it down.

Most of FFG’s digital board game ports have been handled by Asmodee Digital anyway, so perhaps this is simply a case of acknowledging that there doesn’t need to be two studios handling this stuff.

Surviving the Aftermath gets vehicles

We haven’t really covered the new Surviving game much since it launched into early access last year, but it seems to be shaping up nicely so far. They’re now on the third major update which adds vehicles to the game, along with new buildings and trade mechanics. The previous two updates fleshed out the core mechanics of the game, so it’s exciting to see some new expanded content. You can keep up to date with the update roadmap here.

Surviving the Aftermath is currently only available via the Epic Games Store and the Xbox Game Preview scheme.